


Wherein John Grieves and Sees a Man in the Mirror

by thedisgruntledone



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post Reichenbach, not really a crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-22
Updated: 2013-06-22
Packaged: 2017-12-15 18:17:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/852565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedisgruntledone/pseuds/thedisgruntledone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He can't get rid of Sherlock's things. But he's coping. Really. </p>
<p>Based on a prompt from the sherlock kink meme. See notes at the end for prompt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wherein John Grieves and Sees a Man in the Mirror

It’s pathetic, but John finds that he cannot get rid of the things  _he_  left behind. They sit where he left them, collecting dust because he can’t bring himself to touch them, not even to clean. Instead he moves around them gingerly, not really looking as he maneuvers around the remains of unfinished experiments, the laptop, the violin. He knows that this behavior isn’t healthy – he doesn’t need a therapist to point that out. Aware that anyone who enters his flat will realize that he isn’t coping quite as well as he pretends, no one is permitted entrance. He goes to the pub with Lestrade, meets Harry at trendy cafes for lunch that both of them pick at, joins Mrs. Hudson in her flat for tea. He is the picture of a man recovering from the death of a dear friend – worn, tired, but beginning to smile more often, the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth once again deepening with regular use.   
  
It’s working for him, what he’s doing. He is getting better. If sometimes he accidentally allows his gaze to catch on something of  _his_  and has to steady himself for a moment from the pain of it, well, that’s grief. Eventually he will get past that part too. Surely at some point these mementos of his friend will become less painful. Then it will be practical to get rid of them, to free up space for his own use, but until then they will sit, and he will do his best to pretend they aren’t there so he doesn’t have to look at them and it will all be fine.   
  
Then comes the day when he can no longer hide it. When the one person still living who has no sense of personal boundaries decides to make an entrance, and when John arrives home from work he arrives to an impeccably dressed Mycroft Holmes sitting in  _his_  chair, sipping tea calm as you please. John stops, stares, thinks resentfully that of course it would be Mycroft, of course. The man understands social conventions in a way that Sh- _he_  didn’t, which makes it worse when he deliberately ignores them. He clenches his jaw and ignores the man sitting in his flat as though he owns it, striding into the kitchen to make his own tea, even more furious to see that there’s a mug already steaming next to the kettle. He ignores that too, and fills the kettle, trying his best to calm himself down. He’s going to have to face Mycroft at some point, if only to kick him out, so he needs to get it together. He takes a deep breath, and closes his eyes.  
  
Only to have them fly open at the sound of breaking glass. John whips around. Microft is behind him, face impassive as always, staring down at what remains of one of  _his_  beakers. He looks up and smiles blandly. “My apologies, John,” he says, clearly not meaning it. John says nothing, simply stares at the shards on the floor, something deep inside of him twisting, twisting.   
  
“I have to say, while your devotion to my late brother is touching, I think it is past time that you took care of the excess clutter,” he continues in that awful, impersonal voice and John hates him,  _hates_  him.  
  
“Get out”, he hisses, no longer trying to keep hold of his anger. “Get out, and don’t come back. You no longer have a reason to be here.”   
  
“If it is too much for you, I could-“  
  
“I said out!” John said, not raising his voice but filling it with as much venom as possible. Mycroft nods and makes his exit, but he barely sees him, too focused on that stupid beaker on the floor and the feeling that something inside of him has splintered.

He’d thought he was through the worst of it. Eighteen months, he’d told himself, was more than enough time to be so ridiculously torn up about a friend’s death. The depth of his grief had been staggering, but he had forced himself to pull through and get on with his life. Now he realized that he’d just been fooling himself. By keeping all of  _his_  things in the flat, he’d been doing his best to pretend that he was still alive, that he might come striding through the door at any moment with a cry of “John! Case!” and off they would go, haring through London once again. Whole.   
  
John folds himself into a chair and puts his head in his hands. He stays like that for a long time.   
  
It takes six more months before he’s ready to let go. It feels like the beginning all over again, and he withdraws into himself for a while, numb with pain and wondering if it will ever get better. He’d had friends die on him before – such is the casualty of war – but it had never been like this. This is nearly crippling, but he refuses to ponder why. There’s no point in entertaining what-ifs, not when the person he needs to make those wishes reality is gone forever.   
  
Even though the pain of loss is even more intense than it had been before, John welcomes it. It’s a healing sort of pain, he tells himself, and knows it to be true when after a long, hard day he sinks into the first chair he comes across, realizes it used to be Sherlock’s, and doesn’t immediately feel the need to leap from it. Instead he leans back and closes his eyes, letting himself remember his friend perched this chair with a book, or throwing himself onto it dramatically in bathrobe and bare feet. He smiles.   
  
A few weeks later sees him bringing home a few boxes and idly packing up Sherlock’s things. He bins the last of the experiments – the ones involving body parts or anything else that looked hazardous had been taken care of right away, John not quite mental enough to keep them for too long – and sets petri dishes, beakers, slides into one of the boxes with care. He slips into Sherlock’s room, wrinkling his nose at the dusty unused smell of it – and folds expensive suit after expensive suit into two more, grinning to himself at how much of a clothes horse his friend had been, outright laughing when he realizes the man who spent his lazy days lounging in an old tee and pyjama bottoms when he could be bothered to put on clothes at all owned no less than six pairs of dress shoes.   
  
After he finishes everything he has four boxes stacked neatly by the door. He stares at them, considering. The clothes he will donate, he decides, and the books that he didn’t want, as well. They might be able to use the glassware at Barts, he will have to ring Molly and ask. He hasn’t been up to seeing the place since Sherlock’s death, so if she wants them she’ll have to retrieve the box herself. That leaves the random, the things that Sherlock had accumulated on cases or out the whim of the moment, silly paraphernalia that all people tend to gather that means something only to themselves. An antique cigarette case, that ridiculous deerstalker, a mobile phone, boxes of nicotine patches. The ashtray from Buckingham Palace that he’d swiped for John, which up until Moriarty’s return they’d been amusing themselves with by hiding it from each other. John plucked that one back out of its box and set it next to the skull on the mantle. Those and the violin he would keep, could not bear to get rid of them.

In her eagerness to help him, the kind landlady offers up 221C, claiming that she’s been using it as a storage area for years, once she finally realized that it could not be rented out. He would be more than welcome to use it for Sherlock’s things until he figured out what to do with them. John smiles gratefully, and thanks her, makes tea to go with the biscuits and they have a nice visit before he follows her back downstairs to get the key, eager to finish his chore.  
  
He’s so focused on his task that he almost doesn’t see it, would have walked right by it if the cover hadn’t slid off of it just enough for the reflection to catch his eye. Curious, he walks over to it, a large shape covered mostly by a sheet, one corner of said sheet slid far enough to reveal a bit of curved mirror and the word  _wohsi_. Something tugs at him, some memory or thought, and as if in a trance he finds himself reaching up to pull the sheet down farther, eyes fixed firmly on that strange word.  
  
The sheet slides away easily, and he doesn’t look into it but reads the inscription on top, eyes widening as hit comes into full view.  _Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi_.   
  
He’d read the books, of course. They’d been so popular he hadn’t been able to help himself, and one of his mates in the army had had the third one in audio, so he’d figured after hearing that one he might as well read the rest. He’d forced Sherlock to watch the movies once, mostly as payback for wrecking his laptop for the second time. He knows what the thing in front of him is supposed to be, but he doesn’t quite understand why it is there. Why would Mrs. Hudson have the bloody Mirror of Erised in her makeshift storage room? What insane sort of impulse buy could it have been?   
  
John huffs out a laugh. He will have to ask Mrs. Hudson about it when he returns her key. He lifts the sheet to cover the mirror again, when his sees the reflection of something behind him. He peers a little closer as the shape resolves into that of a tall, lanky man entering the room. His hands clench on the sheet and he tenses, preparing to face the intruder, when the man-shape steps closer, and the sheet falls from suddenly nerveless fingers. Just enough light is filtering through the windows to cast a bit of a halo on inky black hair that is currently too short to curl properly, and John’s mouth drops into a soundless gasp as blue-grey eyes pierce his through the mirror. He shakes his head slowly, trembling. His mouth works, suddenly tear-filled gaze never leaving the reflection of the impossible. He wants to close his eyes. He wants to turn around and prove to himself that this is not happening, that what he’s seeing –  _who_  he’s seeing behind him cannot be real, the Harry Potter books are  _fiction_  and the mirror is not showing him his heart’s fondest wish. He wants to never wake up, because he has to be dreaming as this can’t be real and he’s been doing so  _well_ , starting to finally get over it all, it isn’t  _fair_ -  
  
The apparition steps even closer. A coat clad arm lifts and John closes his eyes, unable to keep looking because  _what he’s seeing is not possible_.  
  
There is a hand on his shoulder, and the impossible man behind him says, “ _John_ ”.

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt from kinkmeme: Post Reichenbach, slight Harry Potter crossover. John, somehow, finds the mirror of Erised. After reading the description, he figures out what the mirror does. Obviously, he sees Sherlock alive and well in the mirror. (Bonus points here if he breaks down crying.)   
> Then, he realises Sherlock is actually behind him, entirely not dead.
> 
> I went a little sideways of the prompt - apparently I have ~feelings about John and Sherlocks "death".


End file.
